Ouaké—In a house in the commune of Ouaké, in northern Benin, Djahara, in her twenties and mother of a 14 month old child, hesitated to have her child vaccinated again. After a previous vaccination, her child’s foot had swollen. Worried, she preferred to stop. “Before, I used to take my child to be vaccinated. But after that incident, I stopped. Today, I’ve resumed and I’m happy to do it,” she confides.
Like Djahara, other parents have doubts and some refuse to vaccinate their children. Pockets of hesitation have been noted in certain localities. It was in this context that three cases of type 2 variant poliovirus were reported in October 2025 in the Donga department, bordering Togo.
As part of the response, Benin carried out a free vaccination campaign against poliomyelitis from 24‒27 April 2026, targeting more than 2.2 million children aged 0 to 59 months in six departments of the country, with over 2.8 million doses deployed for the first round.
